Tuesday 4 - Home

 This week the Tuesday 4 is all about our homes. Join me if you'd like.

The cats help our house feel like a home.

 1. What makes a house a home? For me, a home is a place where you feel safe, where you are comfortable, and where you can just be yourself. It is a place where you look forward to returning to when you are away. 

2. How do you keep your house neat, tidy, and clean? Do you find it difficult? On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being neat, tidy, and clean, I would say that our house is about a 7. Sometimes it is worse, especially when we are under stress or working on a big project, and sometimes it is better, especially when we have invited people over. We try to maintain things as we go, but the whole house is rarely all clean and organized at the same time. As I have learned to get rid of clutter, the job of keeping things neat has gotten easier. Cleaning is not my favorite thing, but I try to do a little of it every day so nothing gets too far gone.

3. Are plants important in your home.. or collections.. or wall art?  Is there a theme you like to create?

The jar for this terrarium came from my
parents and the begonia was a volunteer.
Many things in our home have some
kind of personal connection like this.

If it weren't for the cats, plants would be more important in our house. However, the cats we have will chew anything we bring in from the plant world. That is the reason I started making terrariums - so I could have greenery indoors without the cats being able to get to it.

We don't have any big collections unless you count all of the rocks we have collected over time in the basement. Some day, we are going to curate them and Ward is going to make a display box for them. Some. day.

It used to be all the art we had had some kind of personal connection - painting of a favorite place, personal needlework, family photos, etc. But when we staged our last house to sell, I bought inexpensive paintings to go with the decor. You know, it's a lot easier to make something look good when you buy it to go into a specific place rather than trying to fit your odd pieces into the decor. So while we still have some personal things displayed, we are using our staging art, too. BTW, I'm using the word decor here loosely, and we have no themes.

4. What is a typical day/evening like in your home? A typical day at our house is rather mundane. Get up, do the morning stuff, feed the cats, clean the kitchen, etc. Then Ward starts work by going into the office and turning on his work computer. My work schedule varies from day to day. I can work either morning, afternoon, evening, or a combination. If I don't have to go to work immediately, I usually try to get some chores or errands done.  In the evening, after catching up on our days and eating dinner, we settle in for an hour or so of mindless TV or reading with cats on our laps. We like to watch calm, simple things to slow our minds down before bedtime. HGTV and comedy reruns are our favorites for this. We do more than this, but this is the basic structure that our various other activities and projects fit into.

Until next time...

Note: I cut and paste the questions for the Tuesday 4 into the post and Blogger gets confused by this. Thus the various spacing and font sizes. Sigh. However, I'm still thankful for the free blogging service Google provides.